Just an anecdote, but 10 years following about 200-300 laptops, with about 90% of them using SSDs, I only had 2 drive failures, both with SSDs: one of them beca

Just an anecdote, but 10 years following about 200-300 laptops, with about 90% of them using SSDs, I only had 2 drive failures, both with SSDs: one of them became completely unusable (all data lost and impossible to recover anything, even after paying a specialized company to retrieve the data), and the other cost 2k$ to get the data back - and the company struggled with it for a few weeks, after which the data became less useful. Apparently the company was better equipped to handle HDDs, and would have probably gotten the data easily if that were the case. But the experience made me very dubious of SSD reliability. In both cases, users were using their laptops just fine, and out of the blue, the laptops froze or had some erratic behavior, and the next time they booted, the drives were already unusable. On the other hand, when I had an HDD failure (due to electrical power fluctuation), except for some bad sectors where the needle hit the disk, it remained usable for years. So I agree with you, their failure modes are important. Of course, nowadays most laptops only have M.2 slots anyway, so HDDs are completely out of the question.